In the example of a dispenser for travel tickets, the user selects a desired ticket depending, for example, on the destination, on the rate, and on whether it is one way or both ways. Such automatic dispensers are becoming widespread and are made necessary by the increasing number of passengers and the tendency to cut down on ticket offices which require a lot of staff. In the application of the invention to dispensers for tickets, such dispensers need to fulfill many and varied and often contradictory conditions, such as are recited below, without limitation thereto.
These apparatuses should be capable of withstanding the conditions to which they are subjected in the environment in which they are located, in general outdoors and without shelter. This results in vulnerability to vandalism and also to the rigors of the weather (wind, rain and dust).
It is also important that the time taken to select and dispense the ticket be as brief as possible. Waiting in front of a machine is generally poorly tolerated by users standing in front of the apparatus while it is working, even less so by the potential users waiting in line.
Another feature which the dispenser should have is "user-friendliness" which term covers ease of use and the absence of a time-consuming need to learn details of how to operate it.
Furthermore, the user should be able to select, confirm and pay the corresponding amount in a minimum number of operations.
For ticket selection, the user finds it valuable to remain in control of the selections made and, in particular, the order in which parameters are selected, and also being able to return, by "backtracking" in the case of error, without mistakes leading to the user abandoning the transaction or, (if this prolongs the transaction because of the slowness of the apparatus or lack of user-friendliness), causing the potential users standing in line to become impatient and complain.
However, from the point of view of the operator, the dispensers should have flexibility of use, that is to say they should provide a large number of parameters, capable of taking a very large number of values, especially in the case of destinations (which may number up to 100 for example). It is also desirable to issue different tickets without increasing the complexity of the operations. Further, the presentation of the information given to the user to make a choice should be compatible with the practices of the operator, whether from the point of view of standards, colors or use of logos or pictograms.
In addition, dispensers are required to be usable by any kind of individual, regardless of sex, age, height or any other criterion. Likewise, it is important for the apparatus to be capable of use regardless of the viewing angle or the position of the user relative to the apparatus, without the user being obliged to get into a specific position relative thereto, which is an unacceptable constraint in commercial terms.
Known dispensers rely on various means of presenting information to enable a user to make a choice and means for confirming the choice made, that is to say to initiate monitoring of the payment made and the dispensing of the chosen ticket.
Dispensers with a touch screen may be cited as an example. These suffer from a major disadvantage, namely their relative fragility and vulnerability, whether to vandalism attacks or environmental factors. Attempts have been made to remedy this disadvantage by placing a sheet of protective, polycarbonate material over such touch screens at around 3 cm from the screen. However, this spacing leads to parallax, which greatly reduces the readability of the screen and forces a restriction on the number of items of information that can be placed on the screen if it is desired that it is to be capable of being read by persons of different height for example.
A second known type of dispenser comprises a screen carrying certain information relating to tickets. Confirmation or selection is effected with the aid of keys placed at the sides and corresponding to each zone of the screen. That device has the disadvantage of being limited physically by the number of keys which can be placed alongside the screen and, consequently, of being limited as to the number of items of information which can be displayed. Also, the relative locations of the screen zones and the corresponding keys does not allow precise alignment, which makes it necessary to provide optical arrangements to allow the user to mentally associate the screen zone containing the selected information and the corresponding key.
There are also dispensers comprising a front face provided with an array of keys each corresponding to a destination, other sets of keys being provided for the other parameters (class, rate, etc.). With more than a few parameter values, i.e. more than a few destinations, that type of device is extremely difficult to use. Thus, to allow a large choice of destinations, the array of keys may contain up to 600 keys which results in a "wall" effect in front of the user. In spite of arranging the keys in alphabetical order for example, the search for the chosen destination is very slow. Moreover, the user has to back off from this large array, which makes it necessary to re-approach the apparatus to effect other operations, such as selection of the class or type of travel, not to mention the payment itself. It takes an extremely long time to get familiar with such apparatuses. Moreover, even when the user is familiarized, the time needed to effect all of the operations of selection, confirmation and payment remains a lot higher than the standards generally allowed. Moreover, that type of presentation of information necessary for the user to make the choice involves selecting the parameters in a given sequence. In other words, the user has to learn the operation of the apparatus in a first interval of time, for example from pictograms or numbers indicating the sequence of operations, before even starting the actual operations for selection.
Other types of apparatus have been proposed comprising keyboards allowing alphanumeric values to be entered in correspondence with a pre-established code, each code corresponding to a given value of a parameter. However, that type of apparatus requires a relatively long period of learning and familiarization. Above all, that type of apparatus takes an inherently simple operation, which is simply conceived in the mind of the user, namely determining the destination or the type of travel, and transforms it into a complex, abstract mental operation which requires the simple, intuitive information to be converted into a series of abstract codes. Moreover, the use of a keyboard both involves a significant loss of time, which increases the length of the transaction, and also requires the user to take the eyes off the display panel containing the information in order to enter the corresponding code. Such decomposition of successive operations further increases the time taken by the transaction.